Trai wants flexible data protection norms

Sharma said that Trai did a consultation paper nearly a year ago on data ownership, security and privacy in the telecom space.

VISAKHAPATNAM: India needs a data protection and privacy framework that offers the flexibility to accommodate sector-specific requirements such as where to store the data, the telecom regulator said.

“I think there should be a general data protection and privacy framework. And within that framework, if there is a need for any specific sector to think that the data is extremely sensitive and therefore it needs to be localised, that can be worked out,” Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) chairman RS Sharma said on Tuesday.

Sharma was speaking at a panel discussion at the Vizag Fintech Festival 2018 at Visakhapatnam. His suggestion comes even as ET reported on Monday that the Ministry of Electronics and IT, which is in the process of finalising the data-protection legislation, is likely to leave it to sectoral regulators and relevant departments to define what constitutes personal sensitive information. Such data will have to be necessarily stored only in India.

Sharma also supported the data portability architecture that banking regulator Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had created a couple of years ago, which essentially will ensure that the citizen is the real owner of the data relating to the transactions he or she does.

“That architecture, if it is put into place, should make digital lending possible,” he said, adding: “This architecture should be actualised so that the people are empowered and they can use their own data for whatever they want to.”

Sharma said that Trai did a consultation paper nearly a year ago on data ownership, security and privacy in the telecom space.

“We gave the recommendations to the government. We have not given recommendations for the general issues because the data protection and privacy law is coming into existence soon,” he said.

The telecom regulator had also submitted its recommendations around a year-and-a-half ago, pertaining to public data office to ensure easy accessibility, authorisation and payments using APIs, he said.

“We have submitted the broad architecture on this to the government and the only policy change that it requires is on the resale of the data at the last point,” Sharma said.

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